


the quality of mercy

by AvaRosier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Dark, Gen, Self-Mutilation, some canon divergence, spoilers up to 1x11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 15:37:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1715789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvaRosier/pseuds/AvaRosier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> Life is a fight. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the quality of mercy

**Author's Note:**

> I deleted the original fic under this title and reposted a different approach to some of the ideas I'd had. After watching 1x11, especially *that* scene, I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to do with the story.

“You go left and I’ll head across the stream, see what’s over the hill.” Bellamy orders Jasper. The younger man has a pinched look on his face and he’s gripping his rifle tighter than necessary. He’s worried for his best friend, Bellamy knows. It had been a day and half since Monty had disappeared; two days since Clarke had set off with Myles and the Spacewalker.

Myles is still hanging on, thanks to Octavia’s quick study of Clarke’s medical skills. Finn had turned up outside the wall in the early hours, just in time to warn them that the Grounders were probably coming. Bellamy had curled his fists into Finn’s shirt and demanded to know why he’d returned alone.

“ _Where the hell is Clarke_?”

“ _Bellamy, they don’t have a healer. They’re not going to kill her. Anya had two other Grounders with her when she let me go, I didn't have a chance against them. I had to come and warn you guys_.” Finn had insisted, not reacting with any trace of aggression.

He had made the right choice, Bellamy understands that. And they are hardly in a position to make a suicidal trip into Grounder territory in a rescue attempt. He’s not personally inclined to trust the Grounders the way Finn has in the past, but they don’t exactly have any other option where Clarke is concerned. Bellamy hates this because out of all the other delinquents in the camp besides his sister, he’s grown to respect Clarke Griffin the most. He'd despised her at first, seeing her as nothing more than a spoiled rich girl. But he had come to appreciate her focus on their collective well-being and her relative idealism compared to his pragmatism. She’s stronger than he is, he can readily admit that. It’s lonely leading without her.

He’d even go as far as saying she was his friend. Two sides of the same coin.

And he knows that if she is still alive, she must want nothing more than to make it back to the camp. They have directions to the building the Grounders took Finn and Clarke, it’s just a matter of it not being a bright idea to wander far into their territory the day after they repelled an attack.  So, instead, they were officially just looking for evidence to Monty’s whereabouts.

“I’ll stick with him,” Raven tells him, giving him a resolute nod before she followed Jasper up the stream. Bellamy sighs and sloshes his way through four inches of water to the other side and begins to climb the embankment. He had meant what he’d said to Raven to stop her from leaving the camp the other day. She was brilliant and absolutely tenacious; despite the callous way he had treated her after she had landed, Bellamy admired her.  Maybe it was the chaos of battle, but things haven’t been awkward between them since they had hooked up. He doesn’t regret it, even if the sex hadn’t given Raven the closure she sought. 

Two days before, he had stood before her in his tent and stared straight into her eyes while she challenged him, bared to the waist.  He’d seen pain there, and plenty of bravado. She was smarting from the loss of the one person she had loved for so long, who just didn’t love her back the way she deserved. It could be an incredibly disorienting feeling to be essentially alone, without an anchor to make existence more bearable. Bellamy empathized—when Octavia had been taken away and his mother floated, it had felt hollow every day that he returned to their empty home.

Bellamy hadn’t been about to reject Raven’s advances or act like she didn’t know what she wanted. He’d let her stay in control and tried, for a brief length of time, to help her feel a little more tethered. It hadn’t worked, but he’d already known that it wouldn’t.  Nothing but time would help Raven heal.  Until then…

He grunts as he lets the gravity run him down the slope, trying not to make too much noise as he shoves some of the dense foliage out of his face. There’s a rustle on his right and Bellamy shoulders his rifle, pointing it in the direction of the disturbance. It takes most of his willpower to keep his trigger finger disciplined. He pushes his way into the clearing and—

“Clarke? Monty?” He says dumbly, pointing the nose of his rifle towards the ground.  They look…well, they look _alive_. But there’s a terrible look in Clarke’s eyes. Bellamy shakes himself out of his reverie when Monty gives him a little wave.

“Hey. Long time, no see.” Bellamy releases a long-suffering sigh. 

“You and I will have a talk later about improving your sense of direction.” He points at the dark-haired teenager before he sticks two fingers in his mouth and whistles. “Over the hill, Jasper and Raven will double back to the other side of the river. Wait there for us.”

Monty glances at Clarke first to make sure she’s okay with him leaving and she nods. Leaves crunch under Monty’s feet as he heads up the hill and Bellamy turns back to Clarke. At last, they stand before each other, face to face. She, so much more than Monty, looks like she’s been through hell. Cuts compete with purpling bruises to decorate her face and her clothes are dirty. But what worries Bellamy the most is the unnaturally still way she’s standing.

He feels like a prize moron when it occurs to him. “Finn’s alive. So’s Myles.” He reassures her.

This seems to reanimate Clarke some. She closes her eyes and breathes in a sigh of relief. “Good. That’s good. The Grounders said they were going to attack that morning…did you guys…” She trails off, as if afraid to ask.

“We lost six people. Finn made it back in time to warn us, so we were prepared. It could’ve been a lot worse.” He can’t stand not to ask. “Clarke, what happened to you after Finn was taken away?”

She doesn’t seem to have an answer for a minute. Finally, she looks back up at him and shrugs. “Monty was brought in by some Grounders that had caught him. There was only one of them left behind to watch us while the others attacked you. Monty and I managed to free ourselves and we escaped.”

She’s leaving out a lot, and Bellamy isn’t obtuse. He can read between the lines and what he hears in that space is that Clarke had to do some terrible things. It's left a mark on her. Bellamy doesn’t know how to make her feel better; if anything could possibly make her feel better. But she has frequently been his rock, he can try to be hers. So he offers her a pathetic attempt at a smirk.

“You know, Princess, most people can manage a simple walk in the woods without looking like they went through an A/C turbine.” Not a drop of scorn can be found in his nickname for her this time.

There’s a ghost of a smile on Clarke’s face, it nearly makes the sheen of tears in her eyes wobble out onto her cheeks. “You’re such an ass, Bellamy Blake.”

Coming from her, that almost sounds fond.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Anya will take no pleasure in your friend’s death. Prove your worth, and you’ll be welcome here.” Clarke’s chest is still tight with anxiety and powerlessness as she helps Anya’s second, an older man they’d called Xav, gather up the medical implements that lay scattered over the ground.

“I couldn’t save Tris. Why would you want me?” It feels like a valid question. She’d done her best for the younger girl, but with the lack of medical supplies, she could barely make use of the knowledge she’d gained on the Ark. It’s only her and Xav in here, and the man has clearly been left behind to guard Clarke while Anya and the others took Finn and…she swallows thickly.

“We told you. Our healer is gone.” He rises to his feet with a small wince and she mirrors the action. (In hindsight, Clarke will realize she was already formulating a plan before she accepted it would be necessary.) This building used to be a mausoleum, Clarke thinks, remembering the structure from pictures in the digital archives. What survived the virus, that was. Her fingers comb through the animal fur covering the stone tomb. Nobody left to remember who these people were, nobody up there coming to help them. But Clarke doesn't want to contemplate the horrible, slow way the people on the Ark probably died...gasping for breath.

“Will I be able to go back and see them—my friends, my home?” She asks, already knowing the answer. It's strange, that she now considers the camp 'home', but it is. Xav hesitates behind her, but he answers her honestly.

“Tomorrow there’ll be nothing to go back to.” Clarke inhales sharply and closes her hand around the scalpel and the bloody tube that had been in Tris’ body scant minutes earlier. She’s got to get back, she’s got to warn them. _Tris’ body…_

“Those marks on her shoulder—what were they?” Clarke turns around to face Xav. He doesn’t bat an eye at the change in topic. “Lincoln has them, too.” She’d seen them when she was begging him, before letting Bellamy swing the whip once more. She had told him to torture Lincoln. It’d been worth it, she had rationalized in her mind, if it meant figuring out how to counteract the poison ravaging Finn’s body.

“Each scar marks a kill in combat.” Xav explains.

“Five kills? She was just a little girl.” _So are you, Clarke. So are you_. Maybe nobody gets to be a child here on Earth. He raises his chin, offended on Tris’ behalf.

“She was brave.” He states with finality. Clarke steps closer.

“How many do you have?” And then he’s yanking at the ties of his armor and baring his chest to her. There’s a mass of scars there, at least two dozen. This grounder is an old warrior indeed, for all he couldn’t be more than forty years old; he has faced death numerous times and come out the victor. And what is she? She’s just a seventeen year old girl trying her best.

“That’s a lot.”

“And half were after I hurt my knee.” He gazes down at the mottled flesh with pride. She’d noticed the pained look on his face when he moved to stand up earlier.

 _Do it. Now. Now_!

Clarke kicks at his right knee, sending him down on it before she slashes the scalpel across his throat with her left hand. In surgery, when performing that first cut, you have to be sure; you cannot flinch. She feels the give of flesh under the blade. There’s surprise on his face. Anger. He’s going to try to fight because that’s what you do.

You fight until you can't.

But Clarke is already there, slamming him back into the wall and clamping both hands over his mouth, muffling any call of alarm he might have tried to make. “ _Shhh shh shh shh_ ,” she hisses at him. She knows there is nothing in her face asking for forgiveness. Dark eyes meet her own, hands scrabble against her shoulder, fingers tangling with her hair.

Clarke watches with fascinated horror as the life drains from them.  _Her hands look so tiny against his face._   And then it’s over.

She doesn’t let herself think as she flees from the shed, not even to consider trying to take on more Grounders to save Finn. If he was even alive still. Clarke runs through the woods, remembering Finn’s directions from earlier and tells herself that if she can just warn her friends about the impending attack, it would all be worth it.

The snare catches her around her left ankle and she goes flying in the air.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It’s nearly dark again and Anya's tribe hasn't come back from their attack on the camp. Clarke moves through the forest, hypervigilant at every noise. She had at least been fed a little the day before, so the hunger isn't too terrible. She feels completely disoriented, however. In the space of a day, she has killed two men, and not like she had killed Atom. She'd read someplace that killing gets easier the more you do it and...and it's _true_. It's really true, the knowledge threatens to shatter her. How can she ever go home after this? How can she help Bellamy lead and how can she call herself a doctor?

She carries the length of rusted metal connected to the manacle that's still around her left ankle. She hadn't wanted to waste valuable time trying to remove it. Clarke doesn't know what that particular Grounder's name had been, but she remembers his mocking laugh as he toyed with his prey. She remembers the stone-cold pit of fear in her stomach. This time, it had been a long blade to the gut, then again along the throat to bring his death on quicker in case any others were in earshot. It had happened so fast and it'd been desperate and messy. Her face hurts and she can feel the dry blood caked there. She's stuck in a nightmare that won't end. 

 _Killer. You're a killer_. The voice buzzes in her head, a cacophony of damnation. 

There is no way that Anya won't exact vengeance for her men- there could be no doubt that Clarke had been the one to murder them. Xav had said there would be a place for her with their tribe, as a healer. He hadn't posed an outright threat to her life and maybe she could have found another way to escape. But waiting might have cost the people in the camp an advantage in the upcoming battle. But that was too late now, she'd been caught and chained up with nothing to do but feel the slow pass of time, minute by minute, while she was sick with worry for her friends.

"Well, if it isn't everyone's favorite little Princess." 

Clarke freezes in place, gasping in surprise as John Murphy steps around the fallen trunk separating him from her. His voice is full of restrained acrimony, his cadence slow. There's enough light from the moon through the canopy of leaves that she can see the rage simmering behind dull eyes. 

"Murphy, why aren't you in the camp?" She sounds a little shrill with panic. _Oh god, I'm too late, I'm too late..._

"They're all dead, Clarke. It's just you and me."  He tells her flatly.

Everything Clarke had feared has come to pass, and the air leaves her lungs in a rush. She thinks she lets out a few whimpers of disbelief, but she can't be sure.

She senses Murphy moving closer until she's aware of his body heat by her side. She's so consumed by her grief, she doesn't move nearly fast enough to block him. There's a pressure against her hip and then Murphy's leaping backwards with the bloody long blade she had taken from the Grounders' camp earlier. He's breathing heavily and there's a wild look in his eye- Clarke realizes that she's probably going to die. The thought is oddly not upsetting.

But he just drops to his knees before her and holds the knife an inch from his throat, and offers the handle up to her. "Kill me."

" _What_?" Clarke lets out in an incredulous whisper. It's cold enough in the night that her breath is visible.

"It's just you and me," he repeats. "The Grounders might spare you since you know something about medicine. But they'll kill me. I'm asking you to do it, because I'm so tired, Clarke."

And she can see that etched into his face; survival was turning them all into monsters. "I'm tired of fighting from day to day when there's no point. It's just a choice between which death is less horrible." 

Clarke just stood there. Murphy could read her hesitation and nearly crumbles with desperation and bitterness.

"You did this to me!" He accuses, shaking the handle of the blade with the force of his emotions "You and Bellamy and that entire fucking group of cattle. Do you know what the Grounders did to get information out of me? Could your spoiled little blonde head even _imagine_?" 

He starts to cry softly then. "Please, kill me. if you have any mercy inside you, you'll kill me before they do."

Clarke is horrified, but she wraps her hand around the handle of the knife and Murphy's arms fall to his sides. She doesn't realize she's crying herself until the fat, salty tears pool on her bottom lip.  They had exiled him because they hadn’t considered him fit to be a part of their society and Clarke had interceded twice in saving his life. " _Revenge is not justice_ ," she had told Bellamy. It had been kinder than being killers themselves, kinder than automatically resorting to capital punishment the way they had up on the Ark. But after seeing what a week in the wild had done to Murphy, she had to wonder: kinder for whom? Him, or for them?

They hadn’t known what it was to kill, then. But she knows now, and she doesn't think she can bear to do it again. Not like this. She had killed two Grounders to escape, to survive. Because she had been willing to cross that line in order to make it back home. There has to be another way for Murphy. Her hair brushes against her neck as she shakes her head.

"No, we can go hide in one of the bunkers. If we're careful we can...we can..." Her brain racks over the possibilities, trying to find one that is even remotely feasible. She drops the knife onto the ground between them. Murphy's shoulders begin to shake with laughter, the sound is harsh and braying as it reverberates through the empty wood.

"Oh god, you're just as much a fucking coward as Bellamy." He pushes himself to his feet as Clarke gapes at him. "You talked him into letting me stay around because I was oh-so-helpful. But do you know what I did, Princess? _I_ killed Connor. _I_ burnt down your food. _I_ damn near killed Jasper. And I would have killed Bellamy fucking Blake, the hypocrite! And he just lets me go, tells me to take my chances out here."

"Wait- _they're alive_? You lied to me!" Clarke shouts. If they outlasted the Grounders, then she wasn't homeless. She wouldn't be alone. Relief warred with anger in her chest.

"Yeah, I did." And then his fist shoots out and catches her against the side of her head. Clarke's world goes spinning in the dark and she falls onto all fours. She tries to scramble away, to get up to her feet and run.

"It's you or me, Clarke." He says monotonously, gripping the length of chain connected to her ankle and giving a rough tug. And then he's straddling her torso and there are hands curling around her throat and she can't breathe.

Her oxygen-starved brain is panicking and her jackrabbit heart feels like it's going to explode out of her chest cavity. She's fighting; even after everything, she's still fighting. Clarke tries to yank Murphy's hands away from her throat but he's putting his body weight onto them and it's an futile effort. Spots dance over her eyes and she knows she's running out of time. She'll lose consciousness before she suffocates.

She wants to see them again: Raven, Finn, Bellamy, Octavia, even Monty and Jasper. The yearning is so real she can taste it on her tongue. One hand falls against the dirt by Murphy's knee, and her fingers brush against steel.

You always have a choice. Even when the only other option is certain death, you can still make a decision. Sometimes, instinct overrides things, but you choose, even when you're not sure you can live with it. Clarke drives the blade up into the soft, vulnerable flesh of Murphy's belly. He lets out a shuddering gasp and rolls over off her body. She just lies there and draws air into grateful lungs while the dying man wheezes next to her. 

"Thank you," he says before he stills. She understands then, that he had dragged her over to where the blade was, counting on her self-preservation winning out. The last of her strength saps out of her body and she just keeps looking up at the sky.

Clarke remembers lying next to Bellamy against the rough bark of a tree; staring up at the stars with him, the two of them finding comfort from one other while they took a respite from their burdens. He had thought he was a monster and so she had granted him forgiveness that wasn't hers to give, not really.

But she had meant it, all the same. 

“Forgive me,” she sobs over Murphy’s corpse, her vision blurs but she can still make out the whites of his eyes. “I just want to do the right thing, but I don’t know what that is anymore.”

 

“Clarke?”

 

* * *

 

 

 

Murphy is spitting mad and struggling against his guards as Bellamy leads them outside the wall. He hadn't trusted Murphy's intentions after he'd returned to them, and he'd been proven right. That was on him, and Connor had paid the price. They'd lost their food stores, and just a few minutes earlier, Jasper had nearly died at Murphy's hands. They might have outlasted the Grounder attack, but Murphy's actions might have proved their undoing. Bellamy stops and turns to face his prisoner.

"Go." He maintains a casual hold on his rifle and jerks his chin out towards the woods. Sean and Hutch shove him away, sending him sprawling into the dirt. Murphy laughs then, loud and gasping, tinged with hysteria.

"What? _Mercy again_? You're even more of a coward than I thought." He sneers up at Bellamy.

Bellamy smiles at him, nothing more than a small uptick at one corner of his mouth. "You and I both know this isn't mercy."  With that, him, Sean, and Hutch head back through the opening and seal it.

"The grounders are out there!" His yells reverberate through the wooden walls. "Y-you saw what they did to me, what they'll do to me!" Murphy's voice cracks and he sounds genuinely terrified now. But Bellamy gives no answer, clenching his jaw and thinking of Clarke and Monty, still lost out there.  _Please don't let them be suffering_ , is the only prayer he allows himself, pursuing that line of thought only led to horrors. Murphy pounds on the door and kicks at it for a minute before it falls silent out there.

If the Grounders catch him and kill him, then as far as Bellamy is concerned, it would be justice.

Everyone's hard at work: shoring up the walls after the attack, clearing away the few tents that had lit on fire when the Grounders had launched flaming arrows into the encampment. Bellamy heads straight for the dropship where his sister was trying her best to patch up the wounded. 

He pushes aside the flap and pauses near the entrance, just watching her. Octavia was intent on wrapping some seaweed around Kit's bicep, where the sixteen year-old had taken an arrow. 

He's more than aware that the others had been giving Octavia a lot of flack for helping Lincoln, but she's stood up to all the insults of 'grounder pounder' with her chin raised. Bellamy's proud of her; she's strong. Their relationship might never be what it was before that Unity Day, before Octavia had been taken away and their mother floated- but he's glad to be with her here, at any rate.  His little sister had blamed him for her discovery, for their mother's death, but he knows that deep down, she blames herself. She'd grown up knowing that her existence was a crime. 

 _It's not your fault,_ Bellamy wants to tell her. _She knew that day would come but she loved you too much; you're so much like her._ Aurora had been stubborn and rebellious; she had never shied away from teaching her children that they had to be strong. Life was fundamentally unfair. 

When Bellamy had hallucinated Jaha that day outside the bunker, the words the Chancellor had spoken hadn't been his own- they had been Aurora's. 

" _Don’t you get it? Life is a fight_." There had been tears in his mother's eyes as she stood before him, the airlock between them. Tears that she wouldn't get to see her children grow another day older, but not one scrap of fear. The straightness of her spine, the line of her jaw...that had been Aurora: defiant to the very end. When Lieutenant Shumway had pushed the button, Bellamy hadn't looked away from his mother. He hadn't dared.

You find out pretty quickly what you're willing to do when you're desperate. Bellamy had stood before Jaha and pointed that gun at him because it meant getting to Octavia. Making sure she didn't die alone and af-

(She is Aurora's daughter, through and through. She wouldn't have let the fear eat her alive.)

He was a selfish man, Bellamy could readily admit that. And his actions down here had played a role in three hundred deaths aboard the Ark. When the realization had trickled down his spine, it had left him utterly cold. Clarke had been right when she insisted that this wasn't who they were. That hadn't been who he was. Acting reckless the way he had, that was giving up.

The guilt had eaten away at him for days; it still did.

" _What am I supposed to do_?" He had begged the mirage of Jaha.

" _Live, breathe, suffer. You owe them that. You want the peace of death, you’re gonna have to earn it. Do you think you deserve to be free of pain? Do you deserve that gift_?"

After he and Clarke had spoken to Jaha and Bellamy had been pardoned, he'd made another call the next day. He still didn't like the man, but he was beginning to understand the burden of responsibility.

" _How do you deal with the guilt_?" Bellamy had asked the man he had tried to murder. Jaha had straightened up in his seat and scrutinized Bellamy through the screen, looking for any trace of guile. Finally, he had nodded and answered him honestly.

“ _You make the best choices you can, even the hard ones. You ask forgiveness from the people you hurt and try to live without it. Sometimes that’s all anyone can do_.”

 

 Maybe living with the repercussions of his mistakes was a penance in itself.  For Clarke, for them all, for Octavia and for himself, he would try. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She waits until nobody’s paying her any attention; their fascination with her, Finn, and Monty for having survived capture by the Grounders waning as the adrenaline rush of the last two days wore off.  Monty has been sticking to the story Clarke fabricated for them, and for that she is grateful. Finn had been there when she headed to her tent, desperate for the respite that isolation would give her. 

“ _How_?” She had asked, trying not to squirm away from the touch of his hand on her shoulder. There’s a wrinkle in his forehead and worry in his warm eyes. There’s a distant part of her that knows Finn could be the right person to comfort her—as a friend— because of his perspective. In some ways, he reminds her of her father and she wants someone to tell her she won't always have this gnawing pit of emptiness in her gut. That she's still a good person.

But right now, Clarke feels beyond anything she deserves from him.

“ _Anya was going to kill me, she had the knife to my throat. But she…I think she pushed aside her grief and told me to go and not look back. That she was granting me mercy. I wanted to get you but she made it clear they didn’t want to kill you_.” A bubble of hysterical laughter had threatened to burst out of her throat, and she couldn’t have explained to Finn’s perplexed expression why.

It’s a tubular metal implement, one of the scraps lying around the dropship that nobody seems to know the original use for. Clarke feels nothing but absolute calm, a blessed numbness in her mind that keeps her heart from pounding wildly as she glances around surreptitiously for any witnesses as she perches on a log before the communal fire. She places the tube down just inside the flames and waits.

And waits, and waits while she decides who counts and who doesn’t.

Nobody pays her any heed as she carries the tube by its cooler end back to her tent. She had temporarily appropriated one of the small, cracked mirrors that the delinquents used to check their appearance nowadays for this purpose. Shirtless, and now braless, Clarke brushes her hair away from her right shoulder and holds the scorching end of the tube to the soft flesh where shoulder meets chest.

The pain is white-hot; obliterating. In the atavistic space where she is no longer capable of higher-degree thought, Clarke can almost hear them. Begging. Snarling. She breathes heavily in between each one of the small, circular burns she marks onto her flesh.

 _One_. Xav.

 _Two_. The Grounder who had laughed at her from behind his skull-mask.

 _Three_. Murp—John Murphy.

She doesn’t mutilate herself  to celebrate their deaths; maybe she thinks this will keep her from killing more easily and less discriminately.  “ _Clarke—who we are and who we need to be to survive are very different things_.” Bellamy’s words don’t comfort her now, not exactly. But they make her feel a little less unmoored.  

The metal tube is left hidden in her tent to cool off until she needs it again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The sky is beginning to lighten, the inky black giving way to indigo and violet by the time Clarke and Monty get Murphy buried.  She can tell Monty’s worried about her, from the way he bites his lip every time he shifts just enough to look over at her through the fringe of his hair. But she’s beyond able to reassure him of anything. He doesn’t stare at her with horror or disgust, there’s at least that.

It’s a shallow grave, and they’re risking enough by even pausing to do this. But the woods around them are silent save for the morning songs of the birds. She feels so utterly emptied of every emotion in her body. The manual labor had given her time to think about everything that had happened in the past year. Her father’s words echo in her head, real to her in spite of their hallucinated state: “ _Forgiveness isn’t about what people deserve_.”

If not, then what _is_ it about? She hadn’t known the answer then, but she thinks she knows now. Understanding.  She understands now that Abby had been a leader, that she had just been trying to make the best decisions she could for the greater good. Clarke understands now that Abby trusted Jaha and the fact that she’d misplaced that trust, at the cost of her husband’s life, had haunted her ever since.

Clarke can understand now, because it’s so unbelievably hard being a leader. She forgives her mother, not because it’s a question of her deserving it, but because it’s what _Clarke_ needs in order to keep going on. Abby had died trying to get to Clarke, thinking that her daughter hated her. And Clarke would regret for the rest of her life that her last words to her mother had been full of anger and rejection. She wants nothing more than to be enveloped in her mother’s arms; to be with her father again. She wants it with a desperation that’s blinding.

But this is all she is going to get, teetering here on the raggedy edge of survival or total obliteration.

Finally, Clarke faces Monty. “We will never speak of this again. Not even to Jasper, and certainly not to Bellamy.” Her voice remains flat all the way to the end; it’s not a request. Monty steps closer, his arms opening and she flinches away. "I'm sorry, Monty, but if you hug me right now, I will lose it. And I seriously need to keep it together until we get home. Please.”

“Okay.” He accepts it without argument, and Clarke is glad that it's him, and not anyone else, who found her. She slips her arms back into her jacket, wincing at the bone-deep ache that has already settled into her body.

“It shouldn’t take us more than an hour, and remember I need to tell you what I found before the Grounders captured me.” He reminds her and begins climbing up the slope in the direction of the camp. “Oh, here.”

His hand floats in the space between his body and Clarke’s, offering her assistance for the climb. She stares at it for a moment, deliberating. This extension of friendship, of human kindness, feels oddly foreign after what she’s done in the past two days. _I am a killer_ , she thinks.

 _I survived_.

She slips her palm into his and doesn’t let go.

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired by the Animorphs series (K.A. Applegate) and the Clarke/Murphy scene borrows from a similar confrontation between Rachel and David.


End file.
